Inaugural Address

My fellow-citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be
thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no spirit of
boastfulness in our own strength, but with gratitude to the Giver
of Good who has blessed us with the conditions which have enabled
us to achieve so large a measure of well-being and of happiness.
To us as a people it has been granted to lay the foundations of
our national life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the
ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old
countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone civilization.
We have not been obliged to fight for our existence against any
alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and effort
without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under
such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed; and the
success which we have had in the past, the success which we
confidently believe the future will bring, should cause in us no
feeling of vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding realization of
all which life has offered us; a full acknowledgment of the
responsibility which is ours; and a fixed determination to show
that under a free government a mighty people can thrive best,
alike as regards the things of the body and the things of the
soul.

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Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from
us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can
shirk neither. We have become a great nation, forced by the fact
of its greatness into relations with the other nations of the
earth, and we must behave as beseems a people with such
responsibilities. Toward all other nations, large and small, our
attitude must be one of cordial and sincere friendship. We must
show not only in our words, but in our deeds, that we are
earnestly desirous of securing their good will by acting toward
them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their
rights. But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an
individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by the
strong. While ever careful to refrain from wrongdoing others, we
must be no less insistent that we are not wronged ourselves. We
wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice, the peace of
righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and not
because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts manfully and
justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong power
should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent
aggression.

Our relations with the other powers of the world are important;
but still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such
growth in wealth, in population, and in power as this nation has
seen during the century and a quarter of its national life is
inevitably accompanied by a like growth in the problems which are
ever before every nation that rises to greatness. Power invariably
means both responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced
certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other perils,
the very existence of which it was impossible that they should
foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and the
tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial
development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of
our social and political being. Never before have men tried so
vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the
affairs of a continent under the forms of a Democratic republic.
The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being,
which have developed to a very high degree our energy,
self-reliance, and individual initiative, have also brought the
care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth
in industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much
depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the
welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government
throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore
our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is
to-day, and to the generations yet unborn. There is no good reason
why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we
should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the
gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these
problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them
aright.